Bones and Silence

⚖The case for it

Three threads at once: a death Dalziel watches through a neighbour’s window while drunk, anonymous letters from a woman announcing her intentions that pull Pascoe into a search, and a community staging of the York Mystery Plays that gets Dalziel cast as God. The rehearsals are the funniest material Hill wrote, and his sparring with the director is worth the ticket alone. Around it, the Pascoe marriage and Wield’s quiet dignity carry real weight. Chapter headings quote the medieval York Cycle. Readers say “Hill is at the height of his powers,” and that the finale blew their socks off.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The first hundred to hundred and fifty pages are “like watching grass grow, or paint dry,” and one reader puts it that “about 150 pages of the middle could be skipped” from a book already past five hundred. Readers arriving without the earlier novels find Dalziel “two dimensional and really quite unpleasant” rather than funny, since the goodwill is built elsewhere. The phonetic accent spelling and deliberately obscure vocabulary pull people out. The letters convey more than letters plausibly could. And after all that, “loose ends are left dangling at the end.”

— the honest librarian

9h

honest hours

13

sittings